A Case in the Empire of New Texas
Guffawing with laughter as he walks out of the store, he pauses to say, "Phew! You stink a whole new way now,
dontcha?" He starts laughing again. He got himself saying that on video too. He'll upload it in a minute. Maybe he
can auto-tune the guy's screams a little first, or add some filters to the video to make it funnier. He disarms the
security system as he looks down at the fried loser. The guy is definitely a little burnt, but he'll probably live. He
kicks the prone loser out of the way and gets in his truck.
He plays his new recording back a few times and chuckles to himself. After a few tries, he finds the right falsetto to
tune the loser's screams to. He messes with a few filters for awhile. He decides to add an animated pair of testicles
that fall to the ground the moment the loser begins getting electrocuted. To finish off the clip, he adds a caption
that pops up when the guy hits the ground, that reads: I fucked up.
After playing back the finished product a few times, giggling all the while, he uploads the clip to his personal
stream. By the time he's out of the parking lot and back on the road, at least a dozen people have already watched
and rated it. Mostly good reviews. He smiles to himself, lets the clip play back again while he's driving and laughs.
*
*
*
His quarry is holed up in a motel outside of Dallas. The suite of virtual panopticon bots he uses found it for him.
Those programs are worth the steep licensing fee for the triple platinum service he buys each year. Those fees
ensure that no one – not even other triple platinum members – can use that same suite of bots to track him. It also
helps make it harder for bots from other providers to track him too. (Expensive service, but it's as close to invisible
as you can get virtually these days.) Maybe someday he'll get picked up for a show and get a sponsorship that'll pay
the fees for him. That's every hunter's dream, though, and he has work to do right now.
Five miles from the motel, one of his programs chirps, telling him that a pair of hunters have just arrived. He
curses, and guns the engine, weaving between other vehicles as he's checking his competition's progress. His HUD
shows him two figures sitting inside what looks like an armored car. They're definitely working together. He curses
some more. Additional scans show 01753681 undisturbed inside its motel room. (Doesn't look like it knows about
the hunters outside, but there's no way to know for sure, yet.)
One at a time, because he's driving, he opens and applies a stim patch to each arm. They'll just help him do
everything he can normally do but faster. He downed the neurobooster right after he got on the road. It's already
helping him run the scenarios for about two minutes from now when he'll be at the motel.
So far he thinks surprising the guys outside is the best course. He can't decide whether to ram them with his truck,
then get out and finish the job, or if he should approach on foot and put a couple grenades underneath their car. He
chooses the latter because he doesn't want to risk his auto insurance going up.
He pulls into the motel parking lot. He finds a space a few rooms down from where his job is holed up in. The pair
of hunters is still sitting inside their car. They see him. It's a man and a woman. They're about the same age. They
don't look like they're biologically related. (Aww, now ain't that cute?)
He activates the truck's security system and gets out. He touches the brim of his hat and grins at them as he takes a
few steps along the sidewalk in front of the motel rooms. Inside his pockets, he pulls the pins out of two grenades.
A quick toss with both hands sends the grenades beneath the hunters' car. He hits the sidewalk before the shrapnel